A few years ago, in the middle of a family crisis, Clint Ogbenna was dreaming big. His family had been evicted from their home, and he was sleeping on his sister’s couch, gestating his then-nascent brand, Corteiz. When his parents found a new home in Harrow, a drab neighborhood in northwest London, he turned it into an impromptu business address, having early shipments of stock delivered from manufacturers straight to their doorstep.
One afternoon last July, he was recalling those humble beginnings in the 25,000-square-foot warehouse-office hybrid Corteiz moved into in 2024, not far from there.
“I’d say a bad drop is, like, five to 6,000 orders on a drop day,” Mr. Ogbenna said, unimpressed. “And then a good drop is anything upward of 10 to 12 to 13,000 orders.” He looked out over the merchandise — approximately 300 different items at any given time, stacked 30 feet in the air. “Now, in my head, this looks small.”
In very short order, thanks to steady creative evolution, keenly intuitive marketing and a heavy dash of cult of personality, Corteiz (pronounced cor-TAYZ, or perhaps cor-TEEZ — “Say it how you feel,” Mr. Ogbenna said) has evolved from a bedroom concern to a leading and still-growing global streetwear player, with annual revenue in the mid-eight figures. In a cluttered ecosystem erupting with new brands almost daily, Corteiz stands out for its rapid adoption, its ruggedness and sense of play, and its stubborn insistence on restoring the long-eroded thrill of the hunt.
And also its reach, given that it’s located in Britain, not typically a hotbed of streetwear innovation. “The same way Supreme or Awake or Aimé Leon Dore, all these kind of brands, they export a kind of New York energy to the world,” Mr. Ogbenna, 28, said. “I’m exporting a London energy to the world.”
Corteiz — Corteiz Rules the World is the brand’s full name — sold its first garments in 2018, and from the beginning Mr. Ogbenna emphasized scarcity. The brand’s Instagram page was private. “Humans are just humans, innit?” he said. “Curiosity kills the cat.”
At an early Corteiz pop-up in a graffiti-covered basement, Mr. Ogbenna allowed no photos or video. Even now, the web shop remains open for only a handful of days at a time.
“The thing about Corteiz is that it happens offline,” Mr. Ogbenna said in one of a series of interviews over the course of a year. “It’s in real life. You’re gonna see the madness.”
This past summer, that meant a four-city American tour, collaborating with brands in New York; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; and Los Angeles on collections available only on the day of each event. A devout student of local American micro-cultures, he set out to speak the language of each location. His New York event was in a decommissioned subway station under the Bowery (four months before Chanel used it), and his Atlanta pop-up was at the storied strip club Magic City.
“That’s a landmark,” he said. “If that was in London, that would be a listed building.”
After talking about his business for a while, Mr. Ogbenna — Clint419 to the world — stepped out of the warehouse and slipped into his 1988 BMW 635CSi, black with an off-white interior, to begin a driving tour of his early years. It was a gentleman’s car of its day, which he bought because of the model’s prime placement in “Paid in Full,” the 2002 crime drama about Harlem drug lords of the 1980s.
“I want to work harder when I’m in this,” he said. “I’m like, I need to hustle.”
Born to Nigerian parents who relocated to London in the 1980s, Mr. Ogbenna is the youngest of three and the only son. Most of his childhood was spent in the unglamorous precincts of west and northwest London, far from any centers of creative innovation.
As part of the road tour, he drove to the block where he grew up, stopping outside the house he lived in for most of his childhood, which he hadn’t visited for many years.
“A lot of the journeys I took in my life are quite alone, in terms of decision-making and being from this area, which is just kind of nothing,” he said.
Just then, walking up the street was a longtime neighbor, Omari, who, surprised to see Mr. Ogbenna, stopped to chat. The neighbor told a story of how his own mother would remark, when they were teenagers, “Clint’s got his own little style going on.” He encouraged Mr. Ogbenna to keep pushing, then disappeared into his house next door.
Growing up, Mr. Ogbenna wasn’t particularly interested in fashion. “I didn’t know what Supreme was in 2014,” he said. Operating as a pure creature of the internet, he built Corteiz with no fashion training, bolstered with a natural charisma and inspired by the independent hustle of Black-owned American rap labels like No Limit and Roc-A-Fella.
“There was just a sense of, like, We own this, this is ours and we’re doing it our way,” he said.
British street style hasn’t always intersected with American tastes. It has tended to be more focused on athletic gear, in keeping with the European obsession with soccer. Occasionally a brand will break through — most notably, the skate ironists of Palace — but rarely does one leave a firm impression outside the country.
Bahr Brown, a longtime music and streetwear scene mover who serves as an informal O.G. to Mr. Ogbenna, said that Mr. Ogbenna “was able to establish what I would describe as almost the most authentic New York presence for a streetwear brand, even though it is not a New York brand.” For the release of Corteiz’s Nike Air Trainer Huarache collaboration in December 2024, Mr. Ogbenna chose Tom Dick & Harry in East Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood staple for decades but perhaps best known for its cameo in Jay-Z’s 1998 video for “Streets Is Watching.”
Corteiz garments slot neatly into the dominant silhouettes of the day: a touch of European sportiness, a touch of New York toughness. The pieces are straightforward streetwear — sweatsuits, track jackets, T-shirts, denim and cargo pants. Many feature the brand’s logo, a silhouette of Alcatraz, which Mr. Ogbenna described as a symbol of social constraint.
What sets Corteiz apart is the way in which it asserts and advertises itself, the certainty and restraint of its self-presentation. “My clothes are made in the same factories as your favorite brands, but that’s not going to be my unique selling point,” Mr. Ogbenna said.
When Teddy Santis, the founder of New York’s luxury streetwear stalwart Aimé Leon Dore, met Mr. Ogbenna, Corteiz was already on his radar. “The marketing was, like, 10 years ahead,” Mr. Santis said, praising Mr. Ogbenna’s understanding of his core customer.
“If you’re 15, 16, 17 years old, Clint right now is that dude to you,” he said. “He’s a kid who, in front of everyone’s eyes, did what he did. And with the way he did it, there’s a sense of ‘I can do it, too.’”
Much of that comes down to how Mr. Ogbenna has become an object of fascination in his own right. On Instagram, Corteiz has 1.6 million followers; Mr. Ogbenna has almost 800,000. He posts cryptically but with flash, and on X, he can be a fire starter, joking with fans and detractors alike. He’s not a conventional influencer, but he is nevertheless a very public influence — a highly visible avatar of entrepreneurship moving with seeming nonchalance.
“I’ve gone from 100 K to a million,” he said. “Who says I can’t make 100 million? Who says I can’t make a billion?”
“And who says I can’t still maintain who I am?” he wondered. “I’m still gonna go to the shop and get the chicken and chips I want to get.”
Back in the car, he headed to a nondescript office building by a highway, across from a budget hotel. He still pays rent to maintain the first Corteiz office here — “the size of two Chevrolet Suburbans with the windows folded in,” he joked. The space now holds some of the brand’s archive, but mostly its institutional memory: It’s where he made his first million.
In between enthusiastically recalling his early D.I.Y. hustle, when he packed and shipped all his own orders — “I’d be in the self-checkout for, like, six hours, and I’d do, like, 300 orders” — he instinctually ran his hands over a selection of his earliest clothes. “This is so bad!” he said, laughing.
“I’ve built a brand just off my own intuition,” Mr. Ogbenna continued. “Not saying it wasn’t purposeful before, but I’m still young. It was survival.”
What he understood, even more than design and manufacturing, was marketing. While Corteiz’s approach is rooted in the drop culture popularized by Supreme and now part of conventional retail strategies across the fashion industry, it has specialized in adding dimensions of theater.
Corteiz has become known for orchestrating frenzies: a T-shirt giveaway in London’s Soho, where kids chased after Mr. Ogbenna for the final one; a limited offer of cargo pants for 99 pence. (“That was just diabolical,” he said.) In 2022, he had hundreds of young people converging on a parking lot in far west London to trade in their North Face, Moncler and Supreme winter coats for new ones from Corteiz.
“It was establishing the value of the jacket,” he said.
All those events — garment-specific and time-specific, but highly shareable online — helped burnish the brand’s lore. “We don’t pay for attention,” Mr. Ogbenna said, shrugging.
It finds Corteiz nonetheless.
In 2020, Mr. Ogbenna received a cease-and-desist order from Nike for trademark infringement. “I just kind of ignored it,” he said. “I didn’t want to understand the legal gravity.” Afterward, he grew determined. “I was, like, I need to entrench my brand in the culture as much as possible so that if Nike were to get rid of me, it would look like bad P.R.,” he said.
But not long after, an emissary from Nike, unaware of the legal wrinkle, reached out about working together. They’ve since released seven coveted sneakers together.
The shoes have even made their way to the British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, a longtime Corteiz supporter, who has been photographed several times in the brand.
“My pair of Honey Blacks, when I got them, I was, like, I’m going to, like, really cherish these,” Mr. Sheeran said. “I’m not going to beat these up.”
Virgil Abloh wore Corteiz socks to the Met Gala in 2021. And though Corteiz doesn’t seed its clothing to celebrities who aren’t friends of Mr. Ogbenna’s or who didn’t buy the clothes on their own first, the brand has become a quasi-official uniform for British rappers like Central Cee and soccer stars like Eduardo Camavinga, Vinícius Júnior and Lamine Yamal.
As Corteiz becomes more solidified, Mr. Ogbenna has begun to use it as a platform to showcase “facets of inner-city London, important culture from the place we’re from,” he said. Recent collections have paid homage to the rappers Giggs and Crazy Titch, as well as to a particular minor-league baseball cap that became a staple of England’s grime scene in the 2000s.
Though its reach is widening, Corteiz has remained an intimate affair. Mr. Ogbenna runs the brand with a full-time office staff of around 10 people (not counting warehouse and distribution employees). Corteiz doesn’t wholesale — for now, every worldwide order ships from his warehouse. (Around half of his orders are from England. The United States accounts for around 15 percent.)
In a 2024 filing, Corteiz reported revenue of 43 million pounds (about $58 million). That number doesn’t impress Mr. Ogbenna.
“If I valued money, I would be trying to sell this business already, right?” he said. “I get value from people wearing a logo that I made at like five a.m. 10 years ago.”
That steady vision has led titans of streetwear’s earlier generations to embrace him. Weeks before Mr. Abloh died in 2021, Mr. Ogbenna met with him for a few hours at the Louis Vuitton office in Paris. And he has spoken a few times with James Jebbia, the mercurial founder of Supreme. (Corteiz released a collaboration with Supreme in 2023.)
Mr. Ogbenna is still uncertain when Corteiz will establish its own retail footprint. “Our energy comes from when we come to a city,” he said.
The toughest challenge of a permanent location will be capturing and preserving some of the mayhem that has become the norm for Corteiz events. At the New York pop-up in August, an unassuming door on Kenmare Street led to an abandoned section of the Delancey Street subway station.
Like all Corteiz pop-ups, this one began with the release of map coordinates. Fans lined up patiently to be let in, and once they got downstairs, they walked through a decommissioned C train with Corteiz items hanging from the bars. M.T.A. workers in orange vests and N.Y.P.D. officers looked on with baffled amusement.
It was a visually ad hoc operation that moved rigorously: product display in the first car, ordering kiosks in the second, and then oodles of boxes of merchandise in the third car, where runners went to fulfill orders. Throughout the frenetic day, about 1,000 people shuffled through, spending an easy six figures.
“I’m just trying to break even,” Mr. Ogbenna said with a grin.
“I could go online and just press a button over my store, and I know there’ll be 10, 20, 30,000 people ready to buy something,” he said. “It takes way longer and way more energy to do a pop-up that only 500 to 1,000 people turn up for.”
“But I just know the importance of it,” he added. “That’s why I always do it.”
His crew began dismantling the displays when the last customers left, and by 7:30, it was all a memory.
“I know for sure that those 1,000 people that came to that pop-up, they’re gonna remember that for a long time,” Mr. Ogbenna said a few weeks later. “And then maybe someone might mention it 20, 30 years from now. Like, ‘Remember that time you went and bought a T-shirt from Corteiz — in the subway?’”
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